What Happened To April?

It has been brought to my attention that I have been noticeably absent from my blog in April.  What happened, you ask?  For starters, the neighborhood has been rather quiet (except for the one genius around the corner who keeps setting off their car alarm on a daily basis).  Nothing MAJOR has happened, which was rather nice after the hectic-ness of this winter.  So really, what have we been keeping ourselves so busy with?  Let’s see . . .

I have been adjusting to (and rather enjoying) my new job.

I leave the house at 8:10 and am home by 5:30.  I can go two weeks or more without putting gas in my car (for $4/gallon, there should be diamonds in that gasoline).  I have been able to get regular treadmill workouts in on weeknights.  Everyone at the new job is super nice and I have my own office (!!!!), and most of all I enjoy my work and all the new things I am learning.

Erika came home for Easter.

And we had a lot of fun.  Have you ever seen I Don’t Know How She Does It with Sarah Jessica Parker?  Well, we did, and it was surprisingly hilarious.  (Also, I think I have developed a slight crush on Greg Kinnear.  Is that weird?)  We had fantastic time shopping, hanging out, and track-meeting.

You never realize how much you take your siblings for granted until you can’t see them whenever you want.  I miss my sister time.  Can’t wait for June, when both Erika AND Jessica will be back in town!

Nathan broke the coffee table.

Don’t ask me how.  Apparently the coffee table is poorly made, the top being composed of a bunch of small pieces of wood glued together, rather than one large block of wood.  I wasn’t there, but I wish I was, because the story was rather hilarious.  Nathan tells it well.  The best part is the part where the broken piece falls on his big toe.  I think this blurry cell phone picture speaks for itself.

Luckily, my husband is also talented at putting coffee tables back together.

I grew as a person . . .

One day, the good old mailman decided to put the Unfriendlys’ mail in our box.  Normally when I get someone else’s mail, I throw it back in the mailbox with a helpful note to the mailman telling them that they delivered mail to the wrong address.  Or I throw it away.  I was tempted to do one of these things (or both, since there were two envelopes).  But it was clearly not junk mail, and for reasons unknown I felt strangely compelled to be the bigger person. (We have our best scientists on the case, to make sure I didn’t temporarily lose my mind.)  So I returned their mail.  Politely.  And in person!  Growth, I tell you.

I cooked!

Actual meals!  With a grain, dairy, meat, and vegetable!  And also edible!  Two Sundays in a row!  If you don’t believe me, the finger I sliced open with the vegetable peeler will be your proof.

And I had no free time, because . .

I spent the vast majority of the month of April reading, after I got sucked into a book.  Not just any book, but the Game of Thrones series.  I checked it out in a four book e-book set from the library, which was a million times faster than waiting on hold for four separate books.  The problem was, the checkout time is 21 days maximum, and these books are ridiculously long.  And by ridiculously long, I mean longer than any book I have ever read except for perhaps Gone With the Wind.  Or the Bible.  My theory was to read as much as I could during my 21 days, and then I could check out the rest of the books individually.  I figured I would at least get through the first book, and maybe the second if I was lucky.  But then I started reading, and promptly became addicted to the storyline. 

I read breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  I stayed up late reading.  I spent hours of free time on weekends and evenings reading.  I carried my Kindle with me everywhere, and pulled it out whenever I had a spare five minutes.  By some miracle, I finished the first two books with a week to spare.  Since I was averaging a book a week, I decided to move on the third.  What I didn’t know was that the third books is significantly longer than the first and second books.  In paperback form, books one and two are 720 & 784 pages, respectively.  Book three is 1216 pages long!

So the last day of my checkout period rolls around, and not realizing how much longer the third book is, I think I am almost finished.  I tell Nathan I will need to read for probably an hour to finish.  I didn’t want the book to vanish off my Kindle right before the end!  I have been reading forever, and the story seems like it is in a good ending spot.  But every time I think the book will end, I page forward and find yet another chapter.  This continues for FOUR HOURS.  Nathan kept laughing at me, because normally I would love a long book.  But not when I am tired and on a deadline!  FINALLY, I finished the book, well past my bedtime.

Of course now that my checkout period has expired, I have learned that as long as I don’t connect my Kindle to Wi-Fi, library e-books don’t get taken away.  How I wish I had known that before.  But on the plus side, I am getting to read the fourth book now, and at a leisurely pace!

* * *

So you can see, it was a rather busy month in the Realm of Queen Megan, even though none of it was being documented here.  But now that I no longer have to be a book-reading hermit, I fully expect to stop being such a procrastinator and give my blog, my husband, and the laundry a little more attention.  Hope you are enjoying a lovely spring, wherever you are!

Do You Like Free Things? I Do!

If you have a Kindle, you are going to love the website I am going to tell you about.  I have been meaning to share this for a while, since I know many of my friends and family have e-readers. 

The website is called Pixel of Ink.  They do 4-5 posts a day highlighting the Kindle Deal of the Day, bargain Kindle books, and free Kindle books currently available on Amazon.  They summarize the plot of the book and link you back to the Amazon page to download (for free or drastically reduced prices)!  It is so much easier than searching through Amazon’s gigantic website to find free books.  And if you don’t like the book – well hey, it was free!

I have noticed that most of the free or bargain books are trashy romance or mystery/crime/suspense novels (neither of which really interest me).  Also, I’ve noticed a lot of the free books are part of a series (I am assuming they give you one free to get you hooked, so you buy the rest).  But they also have nonfiction, self-help, how-to, and my very favorite – good old chick lit!  The only other downside to the free books is that sometimes I notice some spelling/grammar errors or general format issues.  But most of the time they are easy enough to skip over. 

I got a Kindle for Christmas, and thanks to Pixel of Ink I have not paid for a single book yet.  Since tripping across their website in January, I have downloaded over 30 free books from Amazon that I learned about from them.  I haven’t had a chance to read most of them yet (so far I think I have gotten through 6), but I love that I have my own little library on my Kindle for whatever strikes my fancy when I want to read.  Checking out the daily deals on Pixel of Ink has become part of my daily internet routine, right after checking my e-mail and Facebook.  The free books from Pixel of Ink are great time fillers while I am in between books on the library’s waiting list. 

Check out Pixel of Ink!  If you have a Kindle and like to read, I think you will love it just as much as I do.

Here is a taste what I have been reading lately:

• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins – I have this in hardcover.  I love my Kindle, but I think the classics need to be owned in book form.  I first read this in October, so I am currently re-reading to prepare for seeing the movie next weekend!!!!  If you haven’t read these books yet, READ THEM NOW, before you see the movie.  Seriously, they are that good.
• Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling – I checked this e-book out form the library.  This is a memoir written by a screenwriter, who you may also know as Kelly Kapoor from The Office.  Her book is insightful and humorous (in an appropriate way).  The only thing I didn’t like was that it had footnotes – I normally love these in books, but they were a bit of a pain to read on a Kindle.
• Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang by Chelsea Handler – Also checked out from the library e-book program.  This memoir was hilarious (but in a a highly inappropriate way).  If you are easily offended, you probably won’t think Chelsea is funny.  I, on the other hand, laughed my ass off.
• Chasing Rainbows by Kathleen Long – this was one of my free Pixel of Ink books and I really liked it.  It was about a recently divorced woman who had just lost her father, and how she put her life back together again.
• Next up – The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson & The Olympians Book 1) by Rick Riordan.  I waited on the library waiting list for three and a half months to check this out, only to have my mother tell me she has all of these books at home and I could have borrowed them at any time.  Well, that’s just fantastic.

In Review: My Name is Memory

My fantastic and thoughtful husband bought me a Kindle for Christmas, and one of the first things I did was use my library card to sign up for the Oregon Digital Library Consortium, which is a fancy way of saying, “check out e-books for free with your library card!”.  I immediately placed holds on as many books as I could, and FINALLY it was my turn yesterday to check out my very first e-book:

Ann Brashares is the author of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series, along with a few other young adult novels.  It came to my attention while browsing the e-book selection that this was the only book of hers that I had never read, so of course I had to check it out.

My Name Is Memory (read an excerpt of the book here) revolves around the concept of reincarnation, and centers around two people (souls) – Daniel & Sophia.  Daniel is a rare soul in that he has a memory, which in this sense means he remembers all of his past lives and recognizes the past souls he has encountered.  Sophia does not.  Daniel fell in love with Sophia in an early life and has been searching for her again and again in each of his later lives, because he will never stop loving her.  Basically, they are soul mates.  But whenever he does happen to find her, the timing is bad or circumstances prevent them from being together (and the fact that Sophia does not remember or recognize him is also a tad bit of a problem).  Now he has finally found her in present day (as Lucy), at the right time and right place, but the dilemma is whether will Lucy ever remember who he is, who she is, and who they are together.  And of course, it would not be a story without an evil villain who threatens the potential love-fest.

The story is told from both Daniel’s & Lucy's points of view, and alternates back and forth from present day to flashbacks of Daniel’s previous lives.  The flashbacks tell us the story of Daniel & Sophia and how they came to be where they are today.  It was an excellent read.  I loved the mystery of learning about Daniel’s past lives, and how he and Sophia fell in love over and over throughout time.  The reincarnation element was very creative on the author’s part, because she used it to create an entirely different type of world that exists within the world we know. I could not put the Kindle down, and I managed to finish the book in one day.  It is a love story, but the complications of the storyline make it so much more interesting than your average love story.

HOWEVER – my enjoyment of the book came to a screeching halt with the last page.  I will not tell you how it ends, primarily because it DOESN’T really end.  I began to suspect this when I noticed that the progress bar on my Kindle was at 99% and I thought, “How on earth is it possible that this story almost over?”.  A few pages later my suspicions were confirmed.  The ending is a total cliffhanger, leaving a gazillion unanswered questions, and not telling you how the conflict of the story was resolved or what happened to Daniel & Lucy.  For those of you who like to be left in suspense or draw your own conclusions to answer questions, perhaps you won’t mind it so much.  I, however, prefer clear cut happy endings and this so called “ending” was neither obvious nor did it give me any happiness. 

This left me with two possibilities – either the author couldn’t figure out how to end her own story OR she intends to write a sequel.  Based on reader reviews from Amazon, many people seem under the impression that My Name Is Memory will have a sequel or possibly even be the beginning of a trilogy.  However, I Googled for a solid 15 minutes on this possibility and came up with neither concrete nor current evidence of this as fact.  And given that this book was released nearly two years ago, you would think that if there truly was going to be a sequel, there would be some sort of proof or release date by now.  Which makes me sad, because I really love this book and I want to know what happens gosh dang it!

That being said, I absolutely would still recommend this read to anyone who is a fan of love stories or of the Sisterhood series.  But if you think a cliffhanger will leave you as unsatisfied as me, I would wait and see if another book really is coming, and if so get both and read them one after another.

And in the meantime, Ms. Brashares?  I will be impatiently waiting for a sequel.  So get cracking on that.